The problem with violence on radio is that unlike films or television, you can't blot out 90 per cent of the horror by turning the sound off. Jaws without screams and spooky music is just another story about a fish like The Old Man and the Sea. Even so, there were moments during Vassily Sigarev's play Plasticine when the violence became so terrifying, the anguish so acute, that at the risk of losing track of the plot I had to switch off.

Fortunately, if that word isn't an anomaly in connection with the unredeemably pessimistic outlook of this young Russian playwright, there isn't much plot in Plasticine. It's more a brief brutal glimpse at what sociologists call the sink-estate end of urban society where criminals, prostitutes, junkies, perverts and other examples of low life, struggle to make a living.

When it was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre earlier this year it got rave reviews and a bunch of awards. I wish I'd seen it, if only to confirm what I have always suspected about radio drama - that by dispensing with all the visual distractions the overall flavour for the listener is as intense, as concentrated as a soup cube. Sigarev has been compared to Dostoyevsky, and Maksim - the dazed, confused and doomed young hero whose only solace to the hell around him is to make Plasticine models - to Raskolnikov. That may be pushing it a bit. This is his first play and he's only 25, young enough, I hope, for him to acquire a slightly less gloomy vision of the human condition.

There's as much sex as there is violence in Plasticine and sex on radio, as anyone who heard Sid and Jolene in the shower will agree, verges towards the comical. Not here. If it isn't sadomasochistic it's gang rape and Dominic Cooke, who directed both the stage and radio version, does not allow us the comfort of laughter. It is the sex scenes that are the most violent.

So what, you may well ask, was the point of it all? Search me. It was brilliant and deserves awards but I hesitate to call it entertainment. By contrast, PG Duggan's play Pleas and Directions, another harrowing story about gang rape and violation, had both a moral and a glimmer of a happy ending. You may remember the dreadful story of Alexandra Sablatnig, a young Austrian tourist visiting London who was brutally raped by eight youths and then thrown into the canal behind King's Cross. This is the dramatisation of the relationship that sprang up between the victim and her interrogating policeman. They're an unlikely couple.

She's young, married, beautiful and Viennese. He's old, fat, bald and straight out of Dixon of Dock Green , but somehow it worked. Whether it would have been quite so convincing without Emma Fielding and Kenneth Cranham playing the two main parts I don't know, but I do know Emma Fielding's Austrian accent would have fooled Captain Von Trapp.

Jenni Murray now, isn't easily fooled and certainly not by Edwina Currie whose determination to be pally with her Woman's Hour interviewer just didn't wash. Edwina tried everything - the poor little me approach, 'When you fall in love with some one else's husband you are running risks with your heart'; the devoted daughter approach, 'If you're listening now, love you lots, Mum - she's 91, bless her'; the liberated feminist approach, 'Kinder, Kirche, Küche was never going to be enough for me' - but all Jenni kept repeating was 'What about poor Norma Major. Didn't you think about her?' 'I did Jenni, I did,' insisted Edwina but it fell on deaf ears.